After autumn’s fever and its vivid trees,
infected with colour as the light died back,
we’ve settled to greyness: fields behind gauze,
hedges feint in tracing-paper mists,
the sun diminished to a midday moon
and daylight degraded to the monochrome
of puritan weather. This healing cold
holds us to pared-down simplicities.
Now is the worst-case solstice time,
acutest angle of the shortest day,
a time to condemn the frippery of leaves
and know that trees stand deltas to the sky
producing nothing. A time to take your ease
in not knowing, in blankness, in vacuity.
This is the season that has married me.
When first he painted the Virgin the friar filled
the space around her with angels’ wings,
scalloped and plated, with skies of gold,
heavy with matter. He thought that he knew
that heaven was everywhere. He grew
older, wiser and found that he drew
more homely rooms with pots and beds,
but lavished his art on soft furnishings
and the turn of the waiting angel’s wings
(still gorgeous with colour and precious dust).
Much later, he sensed that his God had withdrawn,
was spacious. On smaller frescoes he painted less,
let wall be wall, but drew in each lawn
the finer detail of sorrel and weeds.
Still later, he found his devotion drawn
to nothing – shadows hinted at hidden rooms,
at improbable arches, while the angel’s news
shattered the Virgin, who became a view
as open as virtue, her collapsing planes
easy and vacant as the evening breeze
that had brought a plain angel to his grateful knees.
I’ve made friends with nothing and have found
it is a husband. See these wedding rings?
Two eyes through which I see everything
but not as I used to. Importance leaves me cold,
as does all information that is classed as ‘news’.
I like those events that the centre ignores:
small branches falling, the slow decay
of wood into humus, how a puddle’s eye
silts up slowly, till, eventually,
the birds can’t bathe there. I admire the edge;
the sides of roads where the ragwort blooms
low but exotic in the traffic fumes;
the scruffy ponies in a scrubland field
like bits of a jigsaw you can’t complete;
the colour of rubbish in a stagnant leat.
These are rarest enjoyments, for connoisseurs
of blankness, an acquired taste,
once recognised, it’s impossible to shake,
this thirst for the lovely commonplace.
It’s offered me freedom, so I choose to stay.
And I thought my heart had been given away.
He started to transform himself in sixty-three,
though few of us knew it at the very start
or suspected his goal was transparency.
We only noticed that he’d disappear
from time to time off the factory floor.
We covered, but his absences grew longer
till, for all our lying, he was finally caught
by the foreman in the locker room,
tied up in a clear chrysalis of thought.
Nothing would shift him, so he got the sack,
but took it quite calmly. When I walked him home
he explained that there was no turning back
from his self-translation. The scales of a butterfly
are not coloured at all, but are shingles of white
which simply accept the prismatics of light
in spectacular patterns. That humility
was what he was after. I met him often
and watched his skin’s translucency
deepen with practice, so that his derm
and epidermis were transmogrified.
He was able to earn some cash on the side
as a medical specimen while muscles and veins
were still visible and then even more
for the major organs as he became pure
through his praying (this after his wife
had sued him for lack of comfort and joy
in their marriage) but by now his life
was simply reflective. I could only discern
his shape in the sunshine, so purged was he
of his heaviness and opacity.
He knew he was nothing. Through him I saw
colours shades deeper than ever before
and detail: the ratchets on a snail’s rough tongue,
the way light bruises, how people fall
to weakness through beauty and when we came
to him for vision, he accepted us all,
made us more real, gave us ourselves
redeemed in the justice of his paraphrase,
the vivid compassion of his body’s gaze.
‘Nothing is happening everywhere,
if only we knew it. Take these clouds,
our most expensive purchase to date,
five million for a fleet becalmed
off the coast of nowhere. I like the restraint
that chose this lack of action in paint,
this moment of poise between travel and rain –
cumulonimbus in a threatening sky,
horizon, cumulonimbus again
as water gives the air its rhyme
and the pressure keeps dropping. An oily tide
buoys up a barrel by the coaster’s side,
emptied, no doubt, by the sailors on board
waiting, tipsy, for their lives to begin
again with the weather. The clouds close in
but this boredom’s far richer than anything
that can happen inside it – than the wind, than a port,
or the storm that will wipe out this moment of nought.’
‘A Calm’: a painting by Jan van de Capelle,
newly acquired by the National Museum of Wales.
The monk says nothing, finger to his lips
and day begins inside his silences.
First dawn then birdsong fill the gaps
his love has left them. He’s withdrawn
to let things happen. His humility
has allowed two kinds of ordinary –
sparrows and starlings – to fight it out
over the fruit of a backyard tree
and against the blackbirds. His nonentity
is a fertile garden, fed by the well
of a perfect cipher, and the water’s cool,
most nourishing. He drinks his fill
and cities happen in his fissured mind,
motorways, roadblocks. He is host
to ecosystems that sustain us all,
for our lives depend on his emptiness.
His attention flickers. He turns away
to something and destroys our day.